From Powells.com

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Staff Pick

Jamison is a remarkable essayist, keen-eyed, observant, and astute. The opening piece centers on her stint as a medical actor and expands into a thoughtful rumination on what exactly empathy is. From prison, to the world’s toughest marathon, heartbreak, and James Agee, these essays are filled with a liveliness and intellectual vigor that makes for an engaging read. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

From personal loss to phantom diseases, a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain — real and imagined, her own and others — Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory — from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration — in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Review

Review

"Gutsy essays....A tough, intrepid, scouring observer and vigilant thinker, [Jamison] generates startling and sparking extrapolations and analysis. On the prowl for truth and intimate with pain, Jamison carries forward the fierce and empathic essayistic tradition as practiced by writers she names as mentors, most resonantly James Agee and Joan Didion." Booklist, starred review

Review

"The Empathy Exams is a work of tremendous pleasure and tremendous pain. Leslie Jamison is so intelligent, so compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best." Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize

Review

"Leslie Jamison threads her fine mind through the needle of emotion, sewing our desire for feeling to our fear of feeling. Her essays pierce both pain and sweetness." Eula Biss

Review

"Leslie Jamison has written a profound exploration into how empathy deepens us, yet how we unwittingly sabotage our own capacities for it. We care because we are porous, she says. Pain is at once actual and constructed, feelings are made based on how you speak them. This riveting book will make you a better writer, a better human." Mary Karr

Review

"The Empathy Exams is a necessary book, a brilliant antidote to the noise of our time. Intellectually rigorous, it's also plainly personal, honest and intimate, clear-eyed about its confusions. It's about the self as something other than a bundle of symptoms, it's about female pain and the suffering of solitary souls everywhere, it's an exploration of empathy and the poverty of our imaginations, it's ultimately about the limits of language and the liberating possibilities of a whole new narrative....The Empathy Exams earns its place on the shelf alongside Sontag." Charles D'Ambrosio

Review

"These essays — risky, brilliant, and full of heart — ricochet between what it is to be alive and to be a creature wondering what it is to be alive. Jamison's words, torqued to a perfect balance, shine brightly, allowing both fury and wonder to open inside us." Nick Flynn

Review

"Brilliant. At times steel-cold or chili-hot, [Jamison] picks her way through a society that has lost its way, a voyeur of voyeurism. Here now comes the post-Sontag, post-modern American essay." Ed Vulliamy, author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline

About the Author

Leslie Jamison is the author of a novel, The Gin Closet, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her essays have appeared in Believer, Harper's Magazine, Oxford American, and Tin House. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

4.54

What Our Readers Are Saying

Average customer rating 4.5 (4 comments)

This collection is so beautifully written, so eloquently worded, that I was brought to tears several times. Purchasing the book was a very smart decision my part, as I plan on reading it over and over again; it was worth every single penny. The overall message is this: we can all improve the ways in which we relate to one another. The world would be a much better place if we learned to feel one another's pain.

Since reading Charles D'Ambrosio's excellent collection "Loitering," I've gotten back into the literary essay. D'Ambrosio contributes one of the many laudatory quotations (sometimes I think they do more harm than good) to this book of essays by Leslie Jamison, who takes pain, suffering, and empathy as her great themes. It's intriguing idea to unify her essays, which cover the West Memphis 3, female illness, travel, the writer James Agee, and her own loss (romantic) and physical pain (an assault). To call them far ranging is a nice way of saying that she goes off on many tangents, is overly reliant of quotes from prominent writers like Sontag, Dickens, Yeats, and Kundera. Too often she comes off as self-absorbed rather than empathetic and she is too liberal with episodes from her own life, which just aren't that interesting. If I hadn't just read D'Ambrosio, I might be kinder, but he sets the bar quite high for essays. Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize!

Smart, sharp writing on some tough subjects. Jamison is intelligent and piercing. The title essay is really wonderful. But the last essay, the Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain is astonishing. Jamison delves into the archetype of the wounded female, using literature, music, and her own life events, and comes back with surprising results. One of the best books of 2014.